End of Year CMMS Checklist for Improved Maintenance Performance

End of Year CMMS Checklist for Improved Maintenance Performance

Webinar Transcription

My name is Craig Shepherd. I am the director of sales here with MicroMain, and today we are going to discuss end-of-the-year CMMS checklist for improved maintenance performance. For those of you who are not familiar with MicroMain, we are headquartered in Austin, Texas. We have been providing facilities and maintenance management software since 1991. We offer maintenance management software as well as a CAFM program for space planning and move management. We do have a special version for healthcare. A few of our logos here. As you can see, we are in all industries, all verticals and worldwide.

Let’s talk about preparing for the new year. Now, end of the year, you’ve probably got a lot of reports that you are trying to get out. You’ve had the maintenance program in place, hopefully, for a good time now, and it is time to go through and reevaluate, see where you are, making any adjustments to your maintenance processes. Make sure you are getting your complete, reliable data to managing your maintenance, and does your data include enough detail? So a few of these issues are pertaining to, are your assets and equipment entered correctly? We will take a look at a few of the screens in a moment. But do you have all your asset information and equipment information in there correctly? Do you have them named correctly? Can you access all the information you need?

You need to look over, and if you have standardized services, and standardized accounts, and maintenance categories, and asset groups for filtering and for reporting? It’s important that everyone be on the same page, calling things the same that facilitates better reporting. So you need to go back through that and make sure you have standardized procedures. Have you closed down any work orders and PMs on a timely basis? And are you entering complete information?

Again, I’ve run across, time after time, where customers have tons and tons of outstanding work orders that have not been completed, and those that are completed, they haven’t put in the proper information. Maybe they didn’t log their time or maybe, or maybe they didn’t log their parts. They didn’t sign it to a correct failure code. So, again, you need to go through, make sure you’re closing them out on timely basis, and also entering all the information that you need in order to get the reports out that you need.

Again, data in, data out. If you want a report that talks about how many times do you have to service a piece of equipment because of a particular failure, and your guys aren’t putting in the failure codes, it’s going to be impossible to pull out that report. So make sure you get all the information you need. Also along those lines, are you consistently tracking the failures in your downtime? If you try to run mean time between failures on your equipment, or you are trying to run down time to see what the down time and up time is. Again, you need to make sure all that information is in there, that everyone is using the same failure codes and same procedures.

And also, as I mentioned earlier, does the data include enough detail on your asset forms? Is there additional data that you need to add to those assets so that’s in your database? Do you have all your manufacturers, your models, your serial numbers? Are they all in there? Are they correct? Are the assets assigned to departments? Are the parts assigned to assets or classes or categories? So that you can report by those. So that’s a lot of things that you need to consider. But, again, now as you are reevaluating what you did last year, is this information in the program so that you can report on it at the end of the year and make sure that you are tracking all the cost associated with maintenance?

We are going to look at a few screenshots of things that I just talked about, and we will kind of go back through them, but on the asset form that you see here, again, a few things to note. Make sure you have a proper naming convention on your assets. This is a piece of equipment in Air Handler. Make sure everyone knows what it is so that it’s accurate and that everyone can find it quickly.

Your manufacturer, your model, your serial numbers, are you assigning asset groups and subgroups so that you can report by this? For instance, I can run a history of this specific air handler, but I can also run a report for this group. How much am I spending on air handlers? Or if they had subgroups. Same thing with accounts. These will be pre-assigned every time you do a work order or a PM. You do the availability to override them. But that might be information that you want to be able to report on. Same thing with departments, if you don’t have this information in here, if everyone is not using the same information, then it’s hard to pull out those reports.

We will look at another asset slide here. Again, on the equipment, do you want to run reports by your depreciation schedules? Or maybe you want to have replacement projections and run those reports, and look at the total cost of ownership of an asset. If those are things important to you, you’re going to have to reevaluate what you need, and then go back in here and start adding this information in so that you are able to pull out those types of reports.

Here is another slide. This one refers to specifications. You can specify anything that you want on a piece of equipment, any asset, so that you can make sure you have all the proper filter sizes in this particular instance and filter types. But whatever the type of piece of equipment, this just makes easy access, so everyone knows what they are supposed to use and what the specs are for any piece of equipment. Of course, a lot of customers, people using this program, instead of putting specs, let’s just add that information as a document that maybe they got from the manufacturer. So, again, there is a lot of fields and a lot of pick lists here on the asset and equipment form, and depending on what you want to get out, you want to make sure that you are putting in the proper information on the front end.

Let’s move on to the next slide here. We are going to plan improvements to your process. So you have been using the program, and even if you are not using the program, and this is something new, these are good benchmarks or metrics to look at to say, “What do we want to get out?” So first of all, review and update your maintenance processes to optimize for today’s goals. Clean up your data to ensure reporting is accurate and performance issues are minimized. And if you have bad data in there, then your report is going to be bad as well.

You want to run end-of-the-year reports to gather actionable data. You want to plan budget to meet the goals of…in this case, I am sorry, we are behind a year here, but 2016 or two years. And then implement new programs to improve performance and reduce costs. So we are going to look at each one of these. But, again, your maintenance software should allow you to run those end-of-year reports on your data that’s important to you, to determine how you’re doing. The reports are going to be crucial in identifying problem areas and determining what your action should be. How can you improve your maintenance processes? For example, there’s reports for budgeted versus actual, and your highest maintenance issues cost, and failure and maintenance efficiencies, and labor efficiency.

So there are tons of reports that will help you analyze how you are doing. Again all important is to get information in on the front end, so that it can come out in the back end in a meaningful report. Let’s look at the first one here, which is, let’s optimize your maintenance process. The slide says, “Analyze the total cost of maintenance to identify opportunities and improve your process and reduce costs.” You’re going to do that through analyzing your work orders, your equipment, your assets, your parts usage, the changes you might have made to your facilities in your building, and, of course, your labor.

You are going to want to track all your PMs. Do you have a current plan? And I’ve seen so many people where they have a monthly or a quarterly PM, maybe it’s a monthly, but they have a machine that’s breaking down every two weeks. Maybe it’s time to readjust that PM, because you’d rather have plan maintenance and try to minimize that reactive maintenance. So, again, you want to look at that plan, and you also want to make sure that plan is effective. Review your equipment history so you can identify and plan for replacement or obsolescence.

If you’re putting in all the correct information, tracking your costs on labor, on parts, other costs, you will be able to run reports to see your total costs of maintaining an asset, and at some point, you’re going to look at the difference between replacing it versus what the ongoing maintenance cost may be. Maybe you get to a critical point where it’s time to just replace it, rather than maintain it.

Again, you are going to analyze your cost of maintenance and identify opportunities to improve your process. For instance, what’s the total cost of corrective and preventive maintenance for that asset? Those are things you need to know. How much you are spending for trouble tickets versus PMs on a piece of equipment? Is there an excessive amount of corrective maintenance for that piece of equipment? You have to analyze that for each piece of equipment or overall maintenance to see if you have a good plan in place. If you have too much corrective maintenance and not enough preventive maintenance, if you are spending 80% of your time on corrective and only 20% on preventive, you may have a problem. Anyway, you can pull that report out and identify that trouble area.

You also, as I mentioned, want to track and make sure that those PMs, that you have a current effective plan, that your procedure is correct and the frequencies are correct. Again, if your frequencies aren’t good, you may end up with a lot more trouble tickets than you had bargained for. You also want to review the equipment history, identifying a plan for replacement, as I said. Again, you can run maintenance history reports, a simple click in the program or reports, and identify your total cost for maintenance for a piece of equipment. You can run asset-diminishing returns reports and total cost of ownership. These are all reporting mechanisms that allow you to take a look at how you are doing. At the end of day, that’s what you are trying to find out.

How you are doing? Are your processes set up so that they are effective, or there are gaps? And, finally, you want to review and update all your maintenance processes to, say, optimize your program. Take a look at your flow of the process. Is it adequate? Are you using work requests modules? Are you using mobile? Are you still taking phone calls or emails? How are your corrective maintenance work orders coming in? Are they being acted on, on time? You need to look at all your processes and make sure that they are on a timely basis and that they are being acted on, and that they are saving you time and money. Are the work orders handled on a timely basis? Nothing worse than a work order, someone tells you machine is down, and they are sitting there and nothing is done.

So you have to make sure that there is a procedure in place. Maybe it’s alert emails, maybe it’s escalation emails to make sure that if someone doesn’t take care of it right away, the next person steps up. Again, these are all things to look at in optimizing your maintenance processes. Also, how do you issue can and assign labor, and what’s your completion process? Do you let everyone just complete their own? Are they doing them on a hand held, which makes things easier? Because they are doing it out there in the field, and it’s real time online, always updated. These are all things to consider when you are looking back at your plan.

Again, I want to mention again, because it’s very crucial. Are your PMs set up on your equipment, and are the intervals sufficient, and are those instructions clear, concise, so everyone knows exactly what they are supposed to do? Also, are you tracking parts inventory? How do you assign and release those parts? These are all things that you need to take a good look at. Make sure that the processes and procedures that you are now using are maximizing the potential of your maintenance solution.

Okay, we’ll go on to the next one, which was…well, here is just a couple of those reports. I’m sorry. These are a few of the reports that we were talking about. You have asset, total cost of ownership. Allows you to take a look at what you paid and what your maintenance costs have been, so you can see is it time to possibly replace it versus continue to maintain it. So there are many reports like this available.

You also need to clean up your data. At the end of the year, you want to make sure that, as I mentioned earlier, all your work orders are complete and closed. You don’t want to have a bunch of things that are just sitting out there that no one ever got around to closing. If you ran a past due report, you would see all of them. So all those reports are available. And then what do you want to do with all these obsolete work orders? Are you canceling them, deleting them? You are going to have a plan for what you are going to do to these things.

Again, are your naming conventions that you are using for assets and your labor and your parts and your services and all that, are they appropriate? Is everyone using them consistently? You want to make sure that if I’m putting in a work request that says, “I’m hot in my office,” and someone else puts in, “AC problem.” You can’t run reports on that, so you have to be consistent. Everyone should be naming it the same thing. Also, have the equipment or assets been removed from operation? If so, inactivate them, take them off the PMs. Make sure that the information is up to date.

And, of course, the last one there mentions labor. Do you have your labor current, and are the rates current? Because if you have all the wrong wage rates associated with your people, you are not reporting on the correct amount of costs associated with doing all of your work. So those are all things that you need to consider as you are cleaning up your data. There’s quite a bit more, but just things like, do you have inactive equipment on PMs or even PMs that you are no longer doing? Get rid of them. Do you have all your failure codes, account codes, your departments, your cost centers, are they all up to date? Have you added new ones? You have to continually maintain it to make sure you are getting effective, efficient data out of there.

These are all things to consider as you are cleaning up your data. Of course, the next step as we go is running those year-end reports. Did your on-demand work order execution meet goals, or were preventive maintenance work orders effective? Was equipment downtime minimized? Was labor used efficiently? Were parts inventories maintained at appropriate levels? These are all things you can report on. They are concrete things that you can look at to see how you are doing. For instance, on the first one, did on-demand work order execution meet goals? You might of had a goal to say, “We want to demand work orders,” which are trouble tickets, so to speak, “we want those to only be 20% of our maintenance.”

Well, you can run a report and see that. It’s actually in the latest MicroMain upgrade. There is actually a dashboard item where you can look at the percentage of that and save it as a dashboard item, so you can always see, at any given time, what your PM versus work order ratio is. So you can see if you are meeting your goals there. Were your preventive maintenance work orders effective? Again, if they are effective, then you should have less corrective maintenance work orders. If you have them set up at wrong intervals with, as I mentioned earlier, maybe you have a quarterly, but you have a piece of equipment that is breaking down every eight weeks, instead. Maybe it’s time to move the interval. Or, possibly, you’re not doing all the steps. So you need to look at that.

If you’re doing things correctly and setting up your PMs correctly, you are going to minimize that amount of downtime for your equipment, theoretically. There are reports to look at if your labor was used efficiently. Do you have guys who are always late on completing work orders? Or maybe they always take twice as long as you estimated. Those types of reports are available. And, of course, do you have parts on hand for the work orders in the PMs? It’s important to make sure you have the proper inventories. In MicroMain you can set min, max, reorder amounts, and make sure that you have the right amount of inventory on hand.

You can also run inventory that you haven’t used, kind of obsolete, and make sure that maybe it’s time to finally write it off rather than carry it on the books. Again, those types of reports are available, and these are important things to look at. We’ll take a look at just a couple of the things I just talked about, report-wise. Maintenance efficiency analysis, here is one where you can see how you’re doing by priority? What’s completed on time with how many are late, so on and so forth. Again, can see how you are doing with regard to completing things on a timely fashion.

This next one is a service analysis. If you are using a pre-defined services where everyone is using the same services, then you can run reports that allow you to see how many of these types of service work orders you’ve had. You can look at your estimate versus average and see variances maybe. Maybe you have estimated times for these things, and your guys are always taking a lot more time than you estimate. So you might have to take a look at them and see maybe you are not estimating long enough. Or maybe your guys are slow. Again, it’s just a way for you to get a look at what’s going on and then evaluate how things are going.

Labor productivity, another one. As I was mentioning earlier, here is a list of all your people, what your estimated hours are, what the actual hours are, and their productivity. There’s a little sample database this came from, so there is not a lot of meaningful data in this little one, but you would be able to see, again, are your guys doing things on a time that you’ve estimated, or they are taking longer? How are they doing? Just a means to look at what’s going on and how your people are doing.

Staff productivity, it’s just a different look at that. Again, each person, their work orders, estimated natural, the variance, as well as scheduled, unscheduled, and the percent late. The point of all these is that, if you are not putting this information in on the front end, if you are not putting in estimated times on work, types of work orders, or PMs, and if your guys aren’t closing them out on a timely basis and putting in their hours, this goes back to making sure that the data is complete, then you cannot run these reports. These are meaningful reports that allow you to see how you are doing. So if they are not closing out work orders, you’re obviously going to have everything showing late.

So it’s important when you run these to say, “I know we’re doing things on time, but it’s showing everything is late.” Perhaps it’s just because no one is finishing the loop and closing out that work order in the maintenance program.

Highest maintenance issues, again, another type of report that allows you to take a quick look at your top 25 highest maintenance issues to see…and this one happens to be filtered for work order type reactive. So you can see what your troubles, what are your top 25 trouble areas. Maybe you have a piece of equipment that’s leading with tons and tons of work orders on it. It might be time to take a look at replacing it. You have to look at the cost of maintenance versus the cost of ownership and see if it’s time to maybe get rid of that piece of equipment.

One of the other categories we talked about here was planning your budget. Plan a budget for…compare your actual maintenance costs against your budgets. We can run reports in MicroMain by department, by shop, by accounts, and we can look at the total cost of maintenance for your complete operation. All those types of reports are available. Again, you can go back and say, “I want to see my…” let’s take a look. I think I probably have a couple of these here. This one is just a strictly, by this property, my labor, my parts, my other costs, and my totals for this particular…whether it’s an entire facility, whether it’s by a building. Maybe it’s just for a particular piece of equipment.

You can maintain these records, but you can only maintain these records if you’ve closed the work orders out, put on your labor, your parts, your other costs.

Also, as I mentioned, you can look at your budgets. What’s expended versus budgeted? How are you doing? Again, as you’re closing them out, if you have accounts assigned to either your equipment, your assets, either pre-assigned, or as you are closing out work orders and PMs, you can assign them as you go. This allows you to run reports that, again, let you know, how well you are doing with your program. Similarly, here, we have budget comparison by categories. How much am I spending on HVAC versus plumbing? So on and so forth. But to get this information out, you need to set up all these various categories. You need to assign them to assets. You need to mark them, when you are closing out a work order.

Budget comparison by departments. Again, lots of different budget reports that allow you, in a nutshell, to see how you are doing. Now, also, when you are planning your budget, that’s budget reports. This is also looking at how you’re doing. What’s coming in the future, so to speak? Are you implementing any new programs or upgrading current tools? Are you going to add mobile functionality for your workers in the field? Because that gives them instant access to their work orders and PMs. Instead of having to come back in and get their work orders, if it’s printed, they can just have them come automatically to hand-held. Saves time and money. They can close things out. They can put on parts. They can have almost full functionality on the hand-held to be able to do all the work they need.

Maybe you need to add the work request module that allows people to send work requests to the maintenance department and also to check the status of their work. Again, instead of calling or emails, which may or may not fall through the cracks, having a work request module has as an audit trail of everything that is requested and shows when it was done and everyone is on the same page. The requesters can check the status, the work request goes directly into the maintenance programs, and nothing is dropped, and nothing falls through.

Do you want to utilize bar coding? In MicroMain, you can bar code all of your equipment and you can utilize the mobile device to actually scan the assets and the parts and add parts too to your work orders and PMs. Additionally, there is a module that allows you to do a parts inventory, to take a physical count using a pocket PC device. So there is a lot of functionality with the bar coding. Again, if you are looking at your budget ahead for next year, these things that you may need to add. You need to plan for what may be coming to improve your efficiencies.

Also, of course, training. Do you have a new staff, possibly, that needs to be trained on this? Perhaps they just need to be sent to…in our case, we have two-day trainings here at our MicroMain Austin headquarters for people to come train, or we offer onsite or on online. The first one says, “Identify process failure points that require retraining for your existing staff.” Maybe it’s time that…you’ve never used bar coding. It’s there, it’s available to you, but no one has ever used it.

Maybe you need additional training on the mobile module. Or maybe you need to training on the reports. Especially now, MicroMain’s latest release, they have a new report and dashboard that gives some pretty comprehensive reporting in addition to the existing reports we have. A lot of people may want a training on the new reports, because a lot of these new reports allow a lot of ways to analyze and slice and dice the data and set up charts and graphs and add those items to your dashboards. Again, identify anything that you might need retraining on or fresh training, if it’s an upgrade, and plan that in your budget as well.

Finally, here, implement the new programs. Fully utilize the software to gather reliable data. Train your team, as I was mentioning earlier, on the process changes, and then update your PM to meet your needs. Again, when you are implementing these new… whether it’s a new program, or you are just implementing new procedures, everyone needs to be on the same page, which means everyone needs to be trained.

But in order to start these new programs, you need to do a look-back to see “What did we do, how we are doing?” Look at the reports that will measure that, and then decide what types of changes will enhance your effectiveness of your maintenance programs. I know that MicroMain can do what we call kind of a data optimization, if you will, where we will look at your program, and we will make recommendations and say, “Maybe you’re not using account codes or department codes or cost centers, or you don’t have your parts in correctly.” So we’ll go in, and we’ll do analysis and make some recommendations so that you can improve your processes. These are all things that can be done.

We’ll just take a look at this last slide here. It’s just kind of wrap up of what we need to do at the end of the year. As I mentioned, first you want to you review and update any of your maintenance processes. Clean up your data and show reporting accuracy. Make sure you have the good data in, because that will ensure you get good data out. Run your end- of-the-year reports. Provide actionable data.

Again, run all these reports about budgets, and how are your guys are doing, and how is your parts usage, and what are your costs of maintenance, so that you can see how you have done, and then budget to meet your…as in this case, not 2014, but 2016 goals, and then decide which new programs you might need to implement. Any new modules, or perhaps you might not be using the full extent of the current program you have. Maybe you’re only using the PM side and now you have opportunity to add the work order side to it, or perhaps you’re not using parts.

You may just want to add the parts functionality to it. A lot of times, I find customers who are using just a fraction of what the program offers. So that’s, again, part of implementing new programs. I thank you for your time.